It's beginning to look a lot like Halloween

Of all the luck, I’m at Hidaka sho an extra day this week but the teacher here that I’m conducting my secret scandalous affair with is off on a business trip.  Even without her though, I’ve had a GREAT day.  It was supposed to be really stressful and hard, too, an it’s been great.  Woke up with enough time to shower and eat breakfast, and I got to use my newly procured shower stool for the first time –honestly, the best thing ever and no, I don’t care how much it betrays about the progression of my cultural indoctrination here; I got to sit on my little stool while I showered and it was wonderful– got to school EARLY for the first time since maybe when used to take the B-5 bus to elementary school, found the dice and blocks I needed for the hairbrained game I hatched last night and finished my prep work for class in the NICK of time before class started.  6th grade in Hidaka, maybe my favorite group to teach.  The sensei are fantastic and fun, the classes are genki and enthusiastic and, on the whole, pretty darn good, and I get to teach them whatever the hell I want to.  Today we did: “How many X’s do you have?” “I have this many Xs.”  Pluralizations are really hard for them to learn, especially to learn the circumstances when we use the plural and when we use the singular.  So we started out with the old “throw things at the students” game, which my GOD I love doing: I launch something or some several things at a kid, the whole class asks him or her, “how many balls do you have?” and the kid says “I have two balls” or “I have no balls” or “I have sixteen balls.”  By the way, yeah, using balls makes this otherwise exciting activity hands-down hilarious.  Then we reviewed parts of the body, with a kid as the demonstration dummy and me poking and prodding him as the class answers what the parts of his body are called in English and Japanese, and then we played our game.  The Homeroom sensei and I would demonstrate: she rolls a big cube that I’ve taped the words, “head,” “foot,” “arm,” “hand,” “leg” and “body” to the six sides of, like a D6.  Head, it says.  “How many heads do you have,” she asks me.  I roll my normal 6.  “I have 5 heads!”  And she draws my five heads on her side of the board.  “How many legs do you have,” I ask her, rolling the big die.  “Three,” she answers.  It’s Halloween, I tell the kids, so we’re drawing each other as monsters.  They not only catch on right away, but really get into the activity, even using the English questions and answers and making great pictures of each other, which we all put up on the board afterwards with magnets.  Three classes of this; genki kids and good teachers to boot.  And afterwards, the teachers came up to me in the office room and told me that it was a GREAT class and they were really impressed and amazed that I’d thought of it on my own (especially as recently as last night) and that I was, they said, the best ALT they’d ever seen.  So that’s a pretty good day.

And AFTERWARDS, we carved pumpkins!  I had tried to include pumpkin carving as an activity for tomorrow’s Halloween Party here, but it got mega vetoed.  But the sixth grade teachers said that they wanted to do it anyway, and since I was here an extra day this week, we should make a special period out of it.  They got three HUUUUUUGE pumpkins from god knows where and we went outside with their classes and carved pumpkins together for like two hours and played and threw pumpkin gook at each other and got messy and had a wonderful time.  And I got to use the knives.  And the kids were totally into it and really great (although they were downright obsessive about cleaning out the insides of the things … one of the tops doesn’t fit back on anymore because they carved too much of the inside meat out around the opening …I tried to tell them it wasn’t a big deal, just scoop out the goop and start makin a face, but you know these folks: they do a job right to the end), and the pumpkins are awesome.  And the first ones anyone has ever seen like this (what the hell did the last ALT do during Halloween?  Isn’t this a no-brainer necessity activity?  Come on.).  And to think, I was stressed out about today.  

I still have to make my costume for tomorrow’s party (and I’ve seen some of the kids’ ones in the art room in the school – things involving paper mache and sewing and props and shit – I’m gonna have to not half-ass this one) and get some props for tomorrow night’s conversation class (we’re having a Halloween party and I need to get some snacks and stuff, and I want to get things so we can play the time-honored “stick your hand in the creepy jar” game, which will be hysterical with a group of old Japanese obaa-chans (grandmothers)), and set up my radio set for tomorrow afternoon’s recording session; but ya know, I think it should be a pretty good day.